The Proto-Beatnik Workout Regimen

The last box of archives continues to surprise. The first Nike edition of Running magazine featured a cover story of the 1980 USA Track & Field Olympic Trials by Ken Kesey. Kesey had a bosom buddy, one Ken Babbs. Who submitted a story of his own for possible publication.

Here is The Lost Report.

BEAT GENERATION HERO AND PSYCHEDELIC REVOLUTION AVATAR WAS A PHYSICAL FITNESS NUT BY KEN BABBS

A six-year-old kid, face freshly scrubbed, his hair slicked back, sprints out the door of the flophouse and speeds onto Denver’s skid row Larimer Street where he weaves and darts like a halfback through the 1932 Great Depression bums lining the sidewalks in dawn’s dingy gray.

The kid carries a load of school books under one arm. As he runs, he bounces a rubber ball off the concrete, swats it against the sides of brick buildings, and angles it off the curbs. His goal is to never miss a catch and never slow down during the early-morning twenty-three-block race to his first grade class.

That kid never stopped running, and during his life’s long distance sprint, he ground the two giants of Fame and Immortality beneath his footworn sneakers.

He became the hero in two of Jack Kerouac’s novels, On The Road and Visions Of Cody. He was featured in novelist John Clellon Holmes’s book, Go. His exploits are recounted by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He’s the major character in two movie scripts by Ken Kesey, Over The Border and Further, The World’s Mightiest Home Movie. He’s also featured in Kesey’s short story published in Esquire, “The Day After Superman Died.” He’s the subject of a recent Hollywood movie, Heart Beat, starring Nick Nolte. His life will be explored fully in a biography to be released this fall, The Holy Goof by William Plummer.

Jack Kerouac called him Dean Moriarity and Cody Pomeroy. He was Hart Kennedy in John Clellon Holmes’s book. Kesey’s fictional name for him was Houlihan. But in biographical accounts and his own family-given Irish moniker, the legendary Neal Cassady.

What was there about him that made him such an attraction? Some say it was his mind, brilliant enough to be able to memorize whole chapters of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume work, Remembrance Of Things Past. Some say his endless rapping – he could talk seven days straight and never repeat himself. Others swear by his body, lean and muscled and not an ounce of fat. Every sinew clearly outlined. But what made him complete was his fitness, his never-ending determination to keep himself trim and alert. In shape to tackle whatever task the day might bring on.

It was that determination to be fit that made him run everywhere he went when he was a kid. At age twelve, he found a bicycle in a trash heap. “It was a single,” he said, years later. “No brakes on it. I’d hit cars, bounce between ’em, throw my feet out, just like you’d throw out the feet to guide yourself on the rocks and man, I tell you, sliding through, real straight.”

In junior high he organized and captained the basketball team. The others wanted to call the team the Demons but Neal picked the name that stuck, the Weavers. Because they were always making baskets.

After one of the games, Neal was in the shower and said he was going to chin himself fifteen times. He was always setting new goals for himself. He’d never done more than ten before.

He leaped up and grabbed a water pipe and did ten quick chin-ups. Eleven and twelve came slower. Thirteen and fourteen took three minutes each. He hung a while and tried number fifteen. His face turned red, then blue. He wouldn’t quit. He pulled himself a quarter of the way up but by then his hands were numb and he lost his grip and fell to the floor.

His arms had lost their feeling and his friend Charlie Wooster had to help him with his clothes. Shortly after, Neal discovered he was physically flawed.

“The way I learned I was color blind,” he said. “I was out there on the grass as youngsters will do and to me it looked red and they’d go by and hit second gear. And Charlie Wooster said, “The grass red? You’re nuts!” I was so mad at that grass, I learned cars.”

His first car was a Buick. “At that time,” he said. “I couldn’t get the stamp – the certificate – so I hitchhiked into Kansas and stole a pair of plates. Hitchhiking back, hot day and all, the sheriff, a local guy, says, ‘Wattcha got under your vest there, boy?’ and I said, ‘Why that’s just my chest there.’ The vest and the chest weren’t right. No. Eight days! Hah. So, Buick’s gone….”

One night when he was sixteen, Neal was in downtown Denver and a soldier stopped him and asked if Neal knew of any cathouses. He wouldn’t believe it when Neal said there weren’t any cathouses. Soldier challenged Neal to a fight. They went into an alley. Neal squared off. The soldier was taller and heavier and a good six years older. He looked into Neal’s burning eyes, saw a fierce, never quit, I’ll go as far or farther than you can imagine look and dropped his hands and turned away without throwing a punch, much to the relief of Neal. He abhorred violence and, later in life, would do anything to avoid a fight.

While still young, Neal had one goal, to play left halfback for Notre Dame because he could throw left-handed on the dead run, seventy yards to a downfield receiver. He played that position and threw that seventy-yarder, but not at Notre Dame. His long passes fell into the hands of his teammates at the Colorado Boys Reformatory.

Neal was sharing an apartment with another guy. The other guy worked at night and slept all day. Neal went to school all day and slept in the bed all night. One night he was awakened by the police banging on the door. They had a warrant to search the place. They found a closet full of stolen goods, burgled from Denver homes. Neal knew then what his roommate did at night. They hauled Cassady in as an accessory and his formal education came to an abrupt halt.

While in the reformatory, Neal discovered books and spent his time either in the library or on the football field or the gym. When he got out, he was ready to leave Denver and his reputation as a “bad kid” behind.

“Not only are we given the grace of an aesthetic,” he said, “but we can go twenty times faster.”

Time is always running out, he figured. So you have to make the best of the time remaining. That’s why he loved driving. Could cover the greatest distance in the shortest time. “The Romans and the Greeks,” he said, “couldn’t go thirty-five except on the fastest horse and only for the shortest stretch.”

In 1947, Neal headed East and began his run into the big time. A friend attending Columbia University introduced Neal to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes and the other writers, musicians and artists who formed the nucleus that afterward expanded into the national movement known as the Beat Generation.

Jazz, poetry and motion were fused into a combined paen praising the glory of human existence rising anew from the ashes of World War Two destruction. Neal Cassady was the living catalyst who best represented the fusion.

“His rhapsodic life is in itself a Beat poem,” wrote distinguished literary critic Warren Tallman. “He’s a Beat saint,” said author Paul O’Neil in an article for Life magazine.

The Beats rode the tidal wave of national popularity until the movement became a fad and was captured on TV with a stereotyped image of your classic beatnik: a sallow-faced, pimply, weak, black-beret-atop-scraggly-hair punk who hangs around crumby dives full of blare jazz where he spouts leftoverlukewarm hip talk and wheedles wine to take home to his pad bereft of furniture with a chick looking dispiritedly on a bare mattress.

By the time the Beat Movement was reduced to that kind of cliche, Neal was living on the West Coast. He had made innumerable non-stop trips back and forth across the country, staying up for days on end, keeping in shape through isometric tension exercises he invented. He used the steering wheel as his exercising device, tensing and releasing his muscles against it, increasing his strength, adding to his endurance, and bending the steering wheel into pretzel shapes in the process.

At the time, Neal was married and had kids and so always had to work. For years he was a brakeman on the Southern Pacific, a job requiring strength and agility. He had to race to catch the train after throwing a switch, then grab for the ladder and hang on for a long ride through the yards, squeezing his body to the side of the train as it passed alongside others.

He also worked as a tire changer in a recapping plant, could throw big truck tires over his shoulder with one hand, change four tires in the time it took a normal man to do one. he used work like an athlete uses a weight-lifting room, as a place to sweat out the poisons, to purify the mind, to unite body and soul in one absorbing satisfying task.

But because of his brilliant mind, Cassady couldn’t be satisfied with strictly menial work. He needed a mental outlet, too, and always turned to literature, first through reading, then writing. He wrote a partial autobiography, The First Third, printed by City Lights Books in San Francisco.

When work and family interfered with the time it took to write, he fulfilled his intellectual bent with talk and became known as the world’s greatest rapper. Lenny Bruce was a contemporary. Bill Murray is a recent aficionado.

In the early Sixties, Neal began frequenting the writer’s circle budding around Wallace Stegner’s topdrawer creative writing class at Stanford. He easily held his own in discussions with writers Ed McClanahan, Bob Stone, Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey.

By 1964, the Psychedelic Revolution was geared up for its run through history and Neal signed on as the driver of Kesey’s bus, Further, that carried The Merry Band of Pranksters to New York City. There they linked up with the Beat Generation patriarchs and picked up the Beats’ dimming torch and reignited the flame. A new generation was emerging. Backpacking, hitchhiking wanderers searching once more for the elusive American spirit that seeks a greatness beyond the bigger car and the higher wage, that looks for a life turned, not only to the material but the heavenly as well.

It was while driving the bus that Neal discovered his final great physical fitness: his four-pound half-jack. The half-jack was a hammer Neal used to wham the tires, checking them for poundage, the tool that beat the split rims apart when he had to repair a flat. It was the juggling pin he threw and spun for hours as he developed more and more intricate routines with which to while away the dead hours when no duty called, the time between the phone booths. Cassady often lamented that Superman had Clark Kent to get him through those dreary unexciting times of no one to save, whereas he, Cassady, had only himself. And his hammer.

He threw and caught the hammer in Mexico where he and the Pranksters woodshedded to wait out the spotlighted mass fad of the Haight-Ashbury Be-Ins and Woodstock-type national media-hype coverage. Neal cavorted barefootedly on the beach beneath the healing sun, awaiting new adventures, no need to go seeking.

One day he fashioned a new game out of rude items he found in the jungle: two sticks of wood, covered with bark. One long and the other small. He held the long stick and knocked the short stick into the air, keeping the short one aloft as long as he could. Two hits were common and three were good, before he blew it and the stick fell to the ground.

After six weeks of constant practice, lurching and staggering, thrusting and sweating, plowing football field-length trenches in the sand, flailing like a swashbuckling Errol Flynn fighting off hordes with cutlasses, Neal achieved a record number of seven hits.

He was triumphant. “It’s a classic example of a great accomplishment performed by a member of the fifth root race emerging from the penalty box after being punished for trying to second guess God,” he said. He firmly believed he was a forerunner of the Aquarian Age, and Aquarius was his sign.

But he was a working servant who never wanted to be the king or the leader. After his record seven hits, he was happy with ordinary fives and sixes. He showed off by the hours and drew flocks on interested Mexicans. One was an old man in black pants and open-neck shirt who made Nervous with his hawklike eyes that assessed Neal’s game like a scorer keeping track.

All right, Neal would show him. He did a four, then a five, another four, then a triumphant six. The stranger picked up his own stick and approached boldly. He bowed, held his stick in front of him and smilingly spoke those universally understood words, “En garde.“

Neal turned his best profile and crossed swords. “Lead on, MacDuff,” he challenged, and old Jose did just that. He whacked with a lusty vengeance and before Neal could move he had been belted half a dozen times and poked another three more. He immediately covered up but it was too late. The stranger knew his business. He raised welts of pain and whelps of aches and yelps of hurts before Neal could drop his stick and hold up his hands in defeat.

The old man raised his sword and bowed regally. He whipped a liter of Tequila out of his hip pocket and offered it to Neal. It was a statement, not a question, and Neal took a big swig. He then brought the old man around and introduced him, saying, “Whatever you do, don’t pick up a stick in front of this guy.”

Neal was humbled but not bitter. He gave up the sticks and returned to his hammer. That and his verbal virtuosities became the final stock in trade he used whenever newer, younger, more curious seekers gathered near, wanting to be instructed.

Because he remained fit, Neal never let them down, and everyone who stood a season in his presence walked away knowing he had been made a little bit stronger.